Some of you might be aware that I have been spending time on Cochin Square, my portal for my home town of Cochin, India. It was a different experience moving away from single author blogs to multi-author blogs. Thanks to the wordpress plugin developer community, I have been able to get the best plugins to run a wordpress based multi-author site with ease. Here is my list of plugins which I use on Cochin Square, hope it helps those running a single installation, multiple author wordpress blogs.

Author Avatars List – This plugin makes it easy to display lists of user avatars on your (multiuser) blog. It also allows to insert single avatars for blog users or any email address into a post or page. I was able to hack it with the help of Ben Jacob and Niju Mohan to make it display random users with at least 1 post in rotation in the sidebar.

Co-Authors Plus – Allows multiple authors to be assigned to a post. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s posts page and feed. New template tags allow listing of co-authors.
EmailUserX – A very simple plugin to email your users. Useful to contact all your authors with a single email.

Gravatar – This plugin allows you to generate a gravatar URL complete with rating, size, default, and border options. A must-have! Add faces to usernames easily with Globally Recognized Avatars.

New User Email Setup – A Plugin to setup the registration email sent to new users. This is useful for a blog where some of the authors might not be familiar with the wordpress way of life.
Peter’s Collaboration E-mails – Enhance the “Submit for Review” feature for Contributor users. This plugin enables automatic e-mails to the relevant users when posts are pending, when they are approved, and when their statuses are changed from “pending” back to “draft”. Lets your contributors keep track of their submissions.